12 years ago I gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy. It was such a relief to have that ball full of energy out into the world where he wasn't kicking and punching me for a good 20 hours out of every day. Ironically, when he was born he was quite the snuggler. If you held him, he would sleep soundly for hours upon hours. If you laid him in his crib, playpen, bouncy chair, swing, or anywhere else, he was awake in 20 minutes or less.
In his first year of life, he went to the hospital more times than I can count. We were there so many times, the ER nurses knew our insurance information by heart. Between the middle of the night cases of croup, the asthma complications, ear infections, and the capper: RSV, I learned more than I ever needed to know about an infant's breathing. Most of the gray hairs on my head now came as a result of having to learn how to pacify a baby enough so he'd allow a nebulizer mask to be put on his face to receive his asthma medication so he could breathe.
I'm not sure how many hours of sleep I actually got in his first year of life, but I'm betting I have more fingers and toes than I did actual sleeping hours. Many long hours, both day and night, were spent rocking him in the rocking chair, as well as watching Barney's Super Singing Circus every 2 hours so he wouldn't notice the nebulizer in his face. Oh, how I had a love/hate relationship with that blasted dinosaur. In those days and hours of frustration and exhaustion, I can't even count the number of times I thought about how nice it would be when he was older and we both could get some sleep.
I wished those days away without even truly realizing it. Now he is older, and in less than 3 years he'll have his driver's permit. In 6 years he'll be graduating from high school and heading off to college. Instead of wishing for the years to pass so I can get some sleep, I really want time to freeze. I want to have lots of memories I can hold onto when our nest becomes empty and his room stays clean for months on end, or I look in the cupboard and realize I don't need to go to the grocery store 2-3 days a week to restock what he's devoured.
In just a few short years, the quiet I enjoy today while my kids are in school will become a deafening silence. Now where there is shouting, arguments with his sister, rough-housing with his friends, and Nerf gun battles that take place throughout the entire house, in 6 years time it will all be replaced by quiet........ lots and lots of quiet.
I will be hanging onto these next few years memories with an iron fist. I may even enjoy every time I have to ask him to make up his bed, pick his shoes up out of the middle of the living room floor, or take out the garbage. As he enters the teenage years, he may drive me batty with his excessive energy, teenage eye rolls, and attitude, but I'm going to put every single one of his mannerisms in my memory bank.
Just as my mother said would happen, my perspective has changed. When I hear a mother talk about how her infant sleeps soundly through the night and how wonderful it is to get things done around the house, I think "how sad". We have a lifetime of doing laundry, cleaning, and picking things up, but only a short while to enjoy our children while they are small.
What I saw 12 years ago as an exhausting, thankless job was actually a blessing filled with hours of snuggling and cuddling with that little bundle of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. Yes, I still look forward with great anticipation to seeing the man he will become, but for now, I'm going to relish in the teenager he's about to be.
Written by Christie Bielss
"Code Blue". 2 words you don't want to hear while you're in the hospital. 2 words you definitely don't want to hear associated with your hospital room number. Every year around my son's birthday, those words pop back in my head. They have been forever etched into my memory. Those 2 words were called out through the hospital's public address system in regards to my rapidly deteriorating health while I was giving birth to my son. I had suffered an amniotic fluid embolism, a potentially catastrophic "medical event".
My son's birthday is a reminder of how very blessed I am that not only did we both survive, but we both didn't have life-long complications from that crisis. This year the feelings are even stronger since there's been a lot of news coverage regarding a local woman who suffered a pulmonary embolism at @ 17 weeks gestation. She was declared brain dead but is being kept alive until the baby can be born.
For me, the condition occurred during labor. I started having chest and rib pains with difficulty breathing. Occasionally, during a labor pain, my oxygen saturation monitor's alarm would sound. The nurse would have me take some deep breaths and all would go back to normal. After a while, those pains in my chest and ribs began to increase. With each labor pain, the chest and rib pains would increase in intensity to the point where they became more painful than the labor pains. It wasn't too long after that when we lost my son's heartbeat. He had crashed, and my vitals were going down rapidly as well.
Within seconds of my son crashing, my OB/GYN and the labor and delivery team were pushing my bed at a full run to the operating room. My labor nurse was pushing drugs in my IV as they ran. I could hear the urgent page for the anesthesiologist over the hospital's public address system.
By the time we had arrived in the operating room, my son's heartbeat had returned, although it was very faint and he was still quite obviously stressed. My husband, who was waiting in the hallway and was not being told anything, was fit to be tied. I remember a nurse coming into the operating room as my epidural was being administered and whispering to the doctor that my husband was about to go ballistic and might have to be restrained. The only problem was that my mom and dad were there and she was sure she'd have to restrain all 3 of them if she tried to restrain him.
The mental image of my husband (6'1", 235 pounds with shoulders the size of a freight train) being restrained by this tiny slip of a nurse who weighed maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, caused me to laugh out loud. The doctor allowed him in and he was able to watch as our son was delivered via emergency c-section.
After delivering my son, it appeared I was doing better as all of my pain had subsided and my vitals were headed in the right direction. I was moved to a room to convalesce for the remainder of my hospital stay. A short time later the chest and rib pain returned. My oxygen saturation monitor started sounding the alarm every 10 minutes. The night nurse exchanged monitors in hopes of stopping the alarm so I could get some rest. The new monitor's alarm started sounding from the minute it was plugged in as well. Convinced it was just the monitor's finickiness, the nurse turned off the monitor.
Within a few hours, the pain was very sharp and weird noises were coming from my lungs with every breath I took. About that time the doctor came in for his early morning rounds. I told him the pain had returned and he looked over to discover the monitor had been turned off. Rather perturbed, he ordered the nurse to turn it back on immediately.
The nurse turned it on and the monitor blinked to life. We all watched and waited for my oxygen saturation reading to pop up. The instant the number displayed, the alarm sounded. My oxygen saturation was at 83% and going down. The doctor jumped into action and started barking orders. A button was pushed on the wall behind me. "Code Blue room ......" was immediately paged throughout the entire hospital. And I realized....... that was my room! Talk about a surreal experience.....
Within a matter seconds my hospital room was filled with medical personnel. The doctor was in the hall with the night nurse ripping her up one side and down the other for turning off the oxygen saturation monitor. An X-ray machine and echocardiogram equipment appeared out of nowhere. Doctors, technicians, and specialists of every sort came in rapidly. There were so many medical personnel trying to get in my room, they were lined up in the hallway. There were nurses telling patients to get to their rooms and having to argue with family and visitors to go to the visitor's lounge and clear the hallway. Apparently car wrecks aren't the only emergencies that make people rubber-neck.
A bazillion tests were performed in a very short span of time. The worst of the worst was......... the arterial blood gas lady. She so sweetly said "I'm going to draw some blood and it might sting a little". "Sting" my right eye! She drew the blood from some vein down in between the bones of my wrist and it did not "sting".......... it hurt like hell! The numbers quickly came back and we were told I was being moved to I.C.U..
As we waited for I.C.U. to open up a space, the administration of 100% oxygen and a laundry-list of drugs injected into my IV's, started to kick in. My body quickly responded and I was finally, truly, taking a turn for the better. While I was still on 100% oxygen, I was allowed to stay in my room and didn't have to go to the I.C.U.. I was thrilled I wouldn't be separated from my son for who knew how long.
After 9 days, the crisis of the embolism passed and I was released with my sweet, healthy baby boy to go home. My first night home we breathed a sigh of relief and I took a delightfully long, hot shower. When I got out of the shower, my legs and ankles were the size of an elephant's. Oh crud.
A new problem had popped up. My mom took my blood pressure. It was quite high and my body was retaining so much fluid I looked like Violet, the girl who turned into the giant blueberry in the movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". Heck, I was pretty sure I could hear the Oompah Loompah's singing their song.
A quick call to my doctor's after-hours number and I was off to the emergency room to meet him there. It was quickly determined that my kidneys weren't functioning correctly. My blood pressure was getting higher each and every time it was being taken. Finally, after what seemed like hours, all of the tests came back. I had postpartum pre-eclamsia. They had to readmit me to the hospital.
Without warning I burst into tears. I hadn't cried a single tear through 9 days of my hospitalization but the thought of having to go back in pushed me over the edge. My husband started patting my hand and telling me it was only for another day or two. The doctor patted my shoulder and handed me a box of tissues. Within a short span of time, I was readmitted, administered high blood pressure medication and my kidneys kicked into action.
After a total of 10 days in the hospital, and months of doctor and specialists visits, echocardiograms, and other tests afterwards, I was back to my normal self.
While I feel so very blessed to have survived all of that, there is still this voice within me that asks why? Why did I live when so many others have died after suffering a medical event of this magnitude? I obviously am here for a purpose, so what is it? I still have absolutely no idea. I'm just a normal, average, crazy redhead. I'm nothing special. I guess one day I'll get to ask that question to my Lord.......... but hopefully not for a very, very long time. For now, I look at it as a time when everything pointed to an ending, but for me, it was the beginning.
Yesterday seemed to be the day for kid trouble. From them waking up cranky, to coming home from school picking at their siblings, to driving their parents insane with the:
"He's touching me!"
"She started it!"
"I did NOT!"
"DID!"
"NOT!"
"DID TOOOOO!"
"DID NOOOOOTTTTTT!"
Oy!!!
The last time my kids drove me this close to the brink of having the men in little white coats take me away was right after our daughter was born and we drove to a family get-together several hours away. Being only a few weeks old, we were concerned with how well our infant would handle being strapped into a car seat for that length of time.
Things were going along so well on the drive to the family function, our worries were for naught. To our great delight, the baby slept the entire way. If we hadn't been so sleep deprived, I think our parent spidey-sense signals might've alerted us to the fact that the baby wasn't sleeping innocently, she was taking a power-nap so she'd have super-human powers later to take over the world and suck all of our brain cells.
Unaware of our pending doom, we relaxed and spent several hours enjoying being in the presence of family before it was time to load up the kids and head home. After lots of running and playing, we expected our 2 year old to be exhausted and sleep the whole way home. Our new baby had handled everyone holding her and had stayed awake for most of the visit, so we were confident she would as well. Our spidey-sense was lulled into complacency and we didn't know what was about to be launched our way.
We didn't even make it 1 minute down the road when we heard the baby "Puh-tooey" her pacifier halfway across the minivan..... and that's when the drive from the most nether regions of the earth's core began. She started crying and got louder by the second. We pulled over and fed her, and she fell asleep but as soon as the buckle snapped on her seatbelt, she awoke and started wailing again. We decided to use the age-old wisdom of letting her cry it out. I bet whoever invented that had a great pair of ear plugs - which we did NOT have in the car. Mike asked "How long can a newborn cry when there's the constant motion of the car to soothe her and baby Beethoven playing as mood music?".
We found out. About 45 minutes later and with her wailing ever louder, Mike turned around in the front passenger seat, found the baby's pacifier and plopped it back in her mouth. He gave a victorious grunt and just as he was turning to sit back down, you could hear "PUH-TOOEY"....she'd spit the thing out again. With a grumble he turned around again, found the pacifier and plopped it back in her mouth. He no sooner took his hand away when she spit it out again and started wailing. And then the 2 year old starts chiming in "Dada, make it stop!"
As the battle of baby and pacifier vs. 40 year old grown man waged, the 2 year old saying ever louder "Make it stop!" and with as much willpower as I could to try to stop it, I couldn't contain a small fit of laughter that bubbled to the surface. A dirty look and a cranky grumble to "drive faster" luckily were all I got in return. Mike finally gave up trying to sit in his seat, or to even let go of the pacifier. For the next 1.5 hours he had his knees in the front seat with his back hunched over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and with one hand was holding the pacifier in the baby's mouth, and using his other to brace himself so his head would quit bouncing off the car's ceiling. With fits of grumbling erupting every so often and the constant battle of man vs. pacifier, I could not contain my laughter. I started giggling which erupted into a full-fledged laughter when Mike shot me a look. That really got me going.
By the time we got home I had obviously lost all brain matter from listening to the battle that was waged and was laughing so hard I had tears running down my face. If the men in little white coats had seen me, they'd have surely taken me away. When we arrived home and I took the baby out of the carseat, she immediately stopped crying and fell into that long-awaited exhausted slumber we'd all prayed for on the drive. It took Mike a good 20 minutes before he was able to unkink his back and get the circulation to return to his legs so he could exit the car. And with a "next time I'M doing the driving!" he collapsed in his recliner. We didn't do much travelling after that trip.....
by: Christie Bielss
